7/03/2014

God, Presbyterians, and Sex, Oh My!

This is a (probably-not-rude enough) guest post on
God and sex from a Presbyterian pal of the Pundit—hope you enjoy!

Because of our mainstream American media—and that
may include some of the posts on this potty-mouthed blog—it’s easy to
stereotype Christians in this country, painting the social construct of their
God as the gun-toting, bomb-dropping, cage-fighting, woman-hating, earth-raping,
gay-bashing, sex-fearing, duck-hunting Jesus. But that leaves out the enlightened,
queer, feminist, antiracist, peacenik, treehugger, economic justice Jesus that
I’ve encountered and followed for most of my life.

Facts are that the historical Jesus of Nazareth as
depicted in the gospels never encountered the nasty realities of napalm and
atom bombs, of dirty bombs and drone warfare and drug overdoses, of global
climate change or global economic injustice or the current global population of
7.2 billion and climbing. Jesus never faced the problems that we do, but He had
the Roman empire and the religious hypocrites of his day to deal with. In light
of pressing contemporary issues, isn’t it strange how some of my fellow
Christians seem like they want to boil down the Bible into a book of stringent prohibitions
regarding human sexuality?

I grew up in church in the 1970s and 80s, and the
most memorable advice about the Bible and sex I ever heard came from a counselor
at a Bible-beating summer camp. The sage and simple suggestion was: don’t read Playboy; read the Song of Solomon instead. Have you ever read the Song of Solomon? Lovely, lusty luscious
love poetry—those verses are hot, what a student of mine recently called Fifty Shades of Yahweh!

Surely, the fundamentalists were teaching abstinence
before marriage even then, but it never came across (at least to me) that this
was because sex was forbidden and wrong and worth repressing, just that it was
so unbelievably sacred yet salacious that it required reverence. As far as I
know, in the 70s and 80s, those creepy daddy-daughter date-nights where young women
pledge to protect patriarchy’s plush property for future papas had not been
invented yet.

For many progressive Christians, our view of the
Bible as mythopoetic mystery is shared by secular readers, critical thinkers,
and even folks from other faiths. Most Christians I know read the Bible as an anthology
of ancient literature, not as a rulebook resulting in arcane romantic
restrictions on the daily lives of consenting adults. It’s a book inspired by
God—not a bully’s whip required by law. The spirit of its law is love, no
matter how the rigid readers try to torque it.

The church where I was baptized in Chicago in 1968
sang a song at that ceremony called “The Lord of the Dance.” This God I learned
about through songs like that—this God is a liberating dance not an authoritarian
trance. That same year, people from that same church took stands for peace in
Vietnam, being part of a cluster of urban churches that let antiwar activists
sleep in their buildings during the tumultuous actions outside the Democratic
National Convention, with some preachers going so far as to join the melee in
the parks, trying to bring peace between protesters and police.

After moving to Cleveland in 1970, we joined the
Congregation of Reconciliation, a small, experimental Christian group committed
to antiracist and civil rights work. This group was part of a small house-church
movement and had “rap groups” to focus on various issues. My surprisingly vivid,
yet scattered, early memories suggest that we also sang “The Lord of the Dance”
in Cleveland, and I recall learning to take communion by intinction, where we
would tear a piece of bread from a loaf and dip into a chalice of real wine. Doing
research years later, I learned that our pastor at the Congregation of
Reconciliation, Bob Hare, had risked his career and faced criminal charges for
counseling and aiding a young woman in obtaining an abortion out-of-state, this
in the years before Roe vs. Wade. It’s comforting for me to remember his
prophetic witness for reproductive choice at a time when many Christians wish
to roll back those rights for women.

Even though I left the Christian church in 1988 for
a spiritual adventure that flirted with New Age, neopagan, Taoist, Jedi,
Buddhist, and other teachings, I kept up with the goings-on in the liberal
progressive church, mainly thanks to my parents, now living in Michigan. By the
early 1990s, gay-rights had become the domestic civil-rights cause of our times,
and my folks were actively crusading for what they called “full inclusion” for
LGBTQ persons within their denomination, the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA). Fast-forward
to 2009, and I reconverted to Christianity and became an active member (now
elder) in a PCUSA congregation.

Through study groups and activism at the local
level, my parents and their colleagues made great strides for change within
PCUSA for more than 20 years. But for decades at our national polity gatherings
called General Assemblies, votes hindered and all but halted progress on LGBTQ
civil rights. As Presbyterians, we are part of what’s called the “reformed”
tradition within Protestantism, which means that we are always reforming, but
for some smaller Presbyterian groups that means becoming more clearly
right-wing conservative, in part in reaction to PCUSA’s recent redefinition as
a more liberal, progressive place within that tradition. (For non-Christians to
understand the splintering of denominations within the church, I find the “People’s
Front of Judea” scene in Monty Python’s Life
of Brian explains it best.)

My father Ken Smith died at home in the Detroit
suburbs on this past May 8, a few weeks before the historic June 14-21 General Assembly
in downtown Detroit (in all the years Dad attended, GA had never been in his
hometown). When the GA arrived in June, it was cushioned by Ken’s memorial service
on June 7 and the interment of his ashes on June 21. And it was in his spirit
that Mom and I attended, for my part as a volunteer blogger and editor with the
More Light Presbyterians, carrying on the struggle for equality within PCUSA.

On June 19 (the day of African-American civil-rights
celebration called Juneteenth at that), the PCUSA affirmed pastoral discretion for
our teaching elders (ministers) to preside over same-gender civil marriages in
states where it is legal and changed the description of marriage in our church’s
constitution to say “two people,” where it previously made the opposite-genders
of those people explicit. The latter change carried a 71% majority and awaits
ratification by a majority of our regional bodies called Presbyteries. The very
next day, PCUSA voted by a much slighter margin to divest from three companies
that profit from the Israeli occupation in Palestine.

Christ’s law of love, often called the Golden Rule, finds
correlating teachings in most other religions and would rarely be disputed by
sensible secular thinkers, not even by the rude host of this blog. It’s an
uncompromising ethic of love and forgiveness that attracts some of us to Christ
(still a majority of Americans, according to surveys) and yet fewer of us to
church (the fewest ever in the pews in recent history).

That some Christians cannot measure the law of love
against today’s hateful legislation and come out the other side with logical
conclusions of peace and tolerance baffles me. Of all the teachings in the
Bible that people might choose to apply to their lives today, conservatives
tend to ignore those overwhelming ones about war and poverty, and instead focus
on taking teachings on sex far outside their intended contexts.

It’s in the Christian spirit of repentance that I would
like to say “I am sorry” on behalf of the bigoted actions that some of my
Christ-following kin have taken against personal freedom, especially as it
pertains to trying to legislate the private lives and health decisions of
people that might not share our religious faith, in this our allegedly pluralistic
society.

It’s probably worth noting that for some leftish LGBTQ
activists, marriage equality feels like a conservative concession to mainstream
values. And for some in the PCUSA, its passage means that folks can focus on
what they perceive as the more pressing peace and justice issues.

While I hoped with a sense of humor that this guest post
might better reflect the Rude One’s consistently lewd and crude tone, at least this
blog’s readers may realize that not all Christians are prudes. It’s not that we
don’t restrict some of our choices based on a relationship with God or even our
interpretation of biblical teaching, it’s just so far from the far right
extremes, that to some, progressive and conservative Christianity seem like
different religions altogether. While I am much more modest and conservative today
on some issues than I have probably ever been, my views are a far cry from the caricature
of the religious right. Happy holiday weekend and here’s hoping for some
fireworks with the consenting romantic partner of your choosing.